The truth about Canada Mel Hurtig talks about important, astonishing and amazing things Canadians should know about this land of ours.
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magine if Canada was a character on the reality TV show Intervention, in which families attempt to salvage the lives of their self-destructive members. From the evidence uncovered by Mel Hurtig, our country would be an easilymanipulated dolt with poor impulse control, memory problems and a bad habit of pawning off valuable possessions. In Canadian Intervention, Hurtig would play the combined role of therapist and Marine gunnery sergeant, trying to convince Canada that it’s not in its best interests to hang out with smooth-talking pundits from right-wing think tanks, tax-dodging CEOs, weapons makers or self-described “journalists” who can’t be bothered to check their sources. It’s a thankless task, but Hurtig obviously loves his country, and has spent years trying to steer it in a different direction. Once owner of one of the largest book retail operations in Canada, he founded Hurtig Publishers in 1972 and later launched The Canadian Encyclopedia. Founder and past-president of the Council of Canadians, Hurtig was elected leader of the National Party of Canada in 1992 and led it in the federal election a year later. Now in his seventies, the energetic and animated Hurtig is promoting his seventh book, The Truth about Canada: Some Important, Some Astonishing and Some Truly Appalling Things All Canadians Should Know About Our Country. We sat down together at a coffee shop in downtown Vancouver to discuss our nation’s latest woes. Common Ground: Many Canadians suspect there’s a discrepancy between what the mainstream media reports on Canadian social and economic issues and the actual truth. But it’s as if the numbers in your book are from a parallel dimension. On almost every major issue, from foreign investment to poverty in Canada, it seems the Canadian media has been either ignorant or misleading about the facts. Mel Hurtig: That’s why I wrote this book. About six years ago I got so pissed off reading Stats Canada Daily. It’s the first thing I read when I go to the Net. So I would read really interesting stuff and the next morning it either wasn’t there or it was so badly distorted from what the actual report was. I got madder, madder
and madder. And then I signed a book contract. Over three years of research I found much more than I ever dreamed of. Horrible distortions by the media to fit their ideology. You get a right-wing publisher like a Conrad Black or Izzy Asper hiring a right-wing publisher, and then the right-wing publisher hires a right-wing editor, and then the rightwing editor hires a right-wing columnist, and you end up getting the kind of junk that appears in The National Post. I think The Globe and Mail is a pretty good paper, but their ideological view is so different than the way most Canadians think. And the other thing I found, the more I looked at this book, is that when the Fraser Institute or the CD Howe Institute or the Conference Board of Canada issues a report, the media
tends to publishes it word for word on their front page or the front page of the business section. And very few journalists in this country bother to take the time to check. CG: Which they would do for any other source. MH: Exactly. The Canadian Council of Chief executives issues a document, and it’s published word for word as Gospel, whereas when the “left-wing” Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives publishes something, it very rarely gets published in the media. They never check the stuff from the big “think tanks.” And [National Post contributor] Diane Francis
comes out with a statement that Canadians buy up more companies in the United States than Americans buy up here in this country, which is absolute nonsense! All the press gallery has to do is pick up the phone and call a hundred yards away to Statistics Canada or Industry Canada and get the exact figures. I quote in the book where prominent Canadian executives such as the CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada make statements about Canadians buying up the States, which are simply not true. These guys say, “Americans only bought up 1,046 Canadian companies.” The true answer is that they bought up over 6,000 Canadian companies and I give example after example. On my desk at home I have, to use the operative word, bullshit, from the CEOs of Canadian businesses. That’s why I wrote this book, why I spent three years putting it together. The key thing about this book is that it’s all sourced. We know exactly where the numbers come from. And instead of getting BS like, “well, our standard of living would drop if it wasn’t for American capital,” I show that most of the takeovers in this country are accomplished by our own money by our own Canadian banks. CG: I’m surprised that no one has thought to do a book like this until now, let alone report it in the papers. These figures aren’t squirreled away in some secret archive somewhere. MH: There are some wonderful journalists at The Globe and Mail, some really good business reporters. Why don’t they pick up the annual report from Statistics Canada? Or why don’t they look at the annual publications from the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development], as I did? One of the strengths of this book it compares Canada to the 29 other OECD countries. It’s astonishing that out of 30 OECD countries, we are twenty-second in terms of poverty, we’re twenty-fifth in social spending, we’re twenty-first in low paid jobs. Only twenty countries have fewer low paid jobs. We’re twenty-second in unemployment insurance benefits. We’re eighteenth in investment in new machinery in equipment. We’re twenty-fifth in research and development. How the hell can we be competitive, how can we be productive, if we don’t
